Arena Announcer

Arena Announcer lives!
After a long, work-related vacation from WoW I will try maintaining Arena Announcer again for the upcoming expansion.

New in 1.2.1: Add/remove aura warnings ingame!
With the slash command /arann warn auraname you can enable or disable warning messages for a specific spell (e.g. /arann warn Divine Shield will toggle the warnings for divine shield). Note that the auraname must be the exact name of the ingame buff (!). Sometimes, the name of a buff is not the same as the ability that invokes it. In the future, there will be a much more comfortable GUI for this.

If you messed up your warning lists, you can always reset it with /arann reset.

Also: on popular demand, server information is gone from player names in cross-server environments!

Also, recently V1.2 introduced the first of the promised cosmetic features. Upon reactivating my account I noticed the only functionality that was broken during the last patches is the icon size. I fixed that and introduced free scalability of icon- and text-size. Both of those parameters can now be changed separately in the general options panel.

DISCLAIMER: I'm German, so there may be grammatical oddities in both this description and the addon documentation. Please forgive me.
Weiter unten gibt's auch eine deutschsprachige Addonbeschreibung.

What does it do?

It announces enemy and friendly buffs/debuffs that are important for pvp combat. This includes long duration crowd controls, powerful self buffs like arcane power or immunities like divine shield or cloak of shadows. The good thing is: it works on all players around you, not only your target or focus.

Also, it will announce when your important abilities are ready again after a cooldown. (For expample: "Bestial Wrath is ready!").

Are there any customization options?

There are basic options. You can choose to show the addon only in battlegrounds or arenas and you can also deactivate the modules separately.

Keep in mind: I wrote this for my arena team and included everything we need and some additional stuff for other classes. This might also be the reason if some important cooldown is missing. I tried to keep it as simple as possible.

Please leave a comment if you have encounter any problems or have ideas for improvement.

Future Plans
- Movable frames
- Making the database dynamic. If enough users want this, I'll try to give you the option to easily decide which buffs you want to be notified of or which cooldowns should be tracked via the ingame menu.

v1.0.6
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New customization options:
- Show/hide text/icons for both modules (Deactivating both text and icons at the same time will result in uninformative messages ^^)
- Activate/deactive tracking of friendly/hostile targets
- Bugfix: Fixed cooldown tracking of many spells (most rogue abilities)
- Added the following spells:
* Will of the Forsaken
* Stoneform
* Shadowmeld
* Ice Barrier
* Counterspell
* Silence
* Shadowfiend
* Power Infusion

v1.0.5b
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- Bugfix: Cooldowns should now properly reset on arena entry
- Bugfix: The options show in battlegrounds and show in arenas should now always work directly after login
- Bugfix: Hiding the cooldown frame while a cooldown is active will not result in an unremovable entry in the cooldown table
- Additionally the modules will now no longer use computation time while deactivated (all events are unregistered on hiding a frame)

v1.0.2
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Overhaul of the cooldown handling. Should be much more efficient now.

v1.0.1
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Added english localization file.
Published on Wowinterface.com.

v1.0.0
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Did extensive Testing on my and a friends schars and completed the German localization file. Though I can't guarantee it's bugfree, this is the first "internal" release. Yay!

v0.2.2
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Major bugfixing:
- There won't be multiple cooldown messages for one event
- Cooldowns should now always show up for all skills
- Activating one skill doesn't trigger a cooldown ready notice for another spell anymore

Originally posted by lilsparky sounds nice. any support for audio alerts? after a while, more text on the screen just doesn't mean much to me. but hearing a sheep sound or a fear sound or a cyclone sound, etc would be awesome.

for sheep you could d/l a sheep "baaa" sound
for fears you could use somebody screaming in terror
for cyclone maybe some gusty wind sound

Hello lilsparky,

thanks for your feature request.

The way you describe audio warnings woud be difficult to implement. Sheep might still be easy, cyclone, too, as there are already appropriate sounds ingame, but:

1) You should hear those (the standard sounds, like sheep) anyway if you are near. Therefore I would have to use custom sounds.
2) It is pretty difficult to identify every single buff/debuff with a unique sound. What, for example, should you use for Nature's Swiftness so that you recognize it instantly?
3) If there is much going on around you, you would get a pretty horrible sound spam. This might not be a problem in 2v2 or 3v3, but definitively in battlegrounds and 5v5.

It would be more realistic to enable audio warnings that play different sounds for different kind of buffs/debuffs (let's say all crowd controls play the sheep sound or some kind of trumpet warning, for example). I still think, audio spam would be an issue.

Anyway, I will definitively think about this. Maybe this would be a good feature that could be implemented as a plugin. But don't expect something like this very soon.

Before I will work on something like this, other features with higher priority wil be added. There will be an overhaul of the database that will allow players to manage which buffs/debuffs are tracked on a per character basis. This should include adding any buff in the game to the database. Well, this will probably keep me occupied for a while.

The way you describe audio warnings woud be difficult to implement. Sheep might still be easy, cyclone, too, as there are already appropriate sounds ingame, but:

1) You should hear those (the standard sounds, like sheep) anyway if you are near. Therefore I would have to use custom sounds.
2) It is pretty difficult to identify every single buff/debuff with a unique sound. What, for example, should you use for Nature's Swiftness so that you recognize it instantly?
3) If there is much going on around you, you would get a pretty horrible sound spam. This might not be a problem in 2v2 or 3v3, but definitively in battlegrounds and 5v5.

It would be more realistic to enable audio warnings that play different sounds for different kind of buffs/debuffs (let's say all crowd controls play the sheep sound or some kind of trumpet warning, for example). I still think, audio spam would be an issue.

Anyway, I will definitively think about this. Maybe this would be a good feature that could be implemented as a plugin. But don't expect something like this very soon.

Before I will work on something like this, other features with higher priority wil be added. There will be an overhaul of the database that will allow players to manage which buffs/debuffs are tracked on a per character basis. This should include adding any buff in the game to the database. Well, this will probably keep me occupied for a while.

actually, i had written something a while back (pre TBC) that did audio cues on just a few different casts - poly, fear, howl of terror...

the difference between the sheep sound from an alert from the game is that the sheep from the game comes at the END of the cast as opposed to when the cast is begun (which is what i assume your alert is based on). this allows you to react to the spell quickly. you don't know for sure it's coming your way, but it's potentially useful information.

and i never really found the audio spam to be too bad. the nature of those particular spells is that they have cast times, diminishing returns and affect single targets -- which means they won't be overly spammy.

anyway, it was just a thought.

and i wouldn't use in-game sounds because that wouldn't help a lot since you wouldn't necessarily recognize a sheep starting to be cast by some enemy vs a person being sheeped somewhere near you.

Originally posted by lilsparky the difference between the sheep sound from an alert from the game is that the sheep from the game comes at the END of the cast as opposed to when the cast is begun (which is what i assume your alert is based on).

Actually, it isn't. It broadcasts the warning when the buff is applied which is what makes the addon very leightweight (at least the buff/debuff-portion), as it doesn't have to do much parsing at all.

I see what you mean, such warnings for spells with casttime like sheep or manaburn could be useful to LOS the spell before it hits, but my addon is focused more on keeping track what happens to your teammates and enemies behind your back without the need for TeamSpeak announcements.
Something in the lines of "My healer is crowdcontrolled, I have to survive on my own" or "The enemy paladin has a divine shield, no use switching to blind him".

This actually might be a possibility for future improvements.

Originally posted by lilsparky and i wouldn't use in-game sounds because that wouldn't help a lot since you wouldn't necessarily recognize a sheep starting to be cast by some enemy vs a person being sheeped somewhere near you.

We agree on that. :-)

Originally posted by lilsparky actually, i had written something a while back (pre TBC) that did audio cues on just a few different casts - poly, fear, howl of terror...

Well, then I know who to ask if I run into problems if I should try to implement this.

Well, then I know who to ask if I run into problems if I should try to implement this. [/b]

lol. yeah, i've been meaning to rework it cuz i (and my friend who also used it) found it to be handy. the problem is that 2.4 totally changed the combat log (which is what i was parsing) and i haven't bothered to look into it.

the code was pretty minimal, tho it was a serious hard-coded hack-fest.

i see what you're saying about the concept of arena announce vs what i was proposing. perhaps the functionality could be wrapped into a single addon, tho.